Cooking

[Caravan Ray]

If it’s not espresso, it’s not coffee.

[jb]

We used to use Clever drippers and a burr grinder, but for the ability to set ahead we now have a Breville Grind Control. The coffee isn’t as good but it’s just a little outweighed by the convenience of the automatic timer.

I still like the Clevers tho

[fluffy]

I did a followup video comparing my 1800W induction hotplate against the same 1300W kettle, and this time the margin of victory was way less clear:



The induction hotplate had a 40% power advantage but it only got a 20% time advantage, showing much more closely how inefficient induction is compared to direct immersion heating. (But that said it's still better than using a traditional hotplate.)

I'll probably keep using the electric kettle, just because it's a lot more convenient than the stovetop kettle. Usually I don't need my hot water right away.

[fluffy]

Made two things tonight:

1. another pot of chili, this time using Progresso tomato soup instead of canned tomatoes because I found out I didn't have any canned tomatoes; I also added a few ounces of 100% cacao which made it amazing
2. ginger ale syrup, with cardamom and lemon and lime. I didn't use enough cardamom and I definitely used too much sugar. I think I also need to change my recipe to basically brew tea first, before adding the sugar, since I suspect that dissolving the sugar at the same time as brewing everything else makes the water less effective at extracting herbs etc.

[jb]

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Rotisserie chicken carcass stock

[fluffy]

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soba noodles with beef, fried bean curd, and bell peppers

[owl]

So much stress cooking/baking going on right now chez owl. The week’s meals (no pics sorry!) have included:

Dutch baby pancake with fresh lemon curd
Asparagus soup with cheese biscuits
Rice salad (black olives, preserved lemon, lemon vinaigrette, fresh parsley, canned salmon, chickpeas, celery) with falafel (started from dried chickpeas)
Almond financiers (brown butter cookies)
Okonomiyaki (vegetarian, with cabbage and carrots) with spicy chili crisp mayonnaise

It’s also sunny enough out now that it feels acceptable to start drinking green smoothies again, so I’ve had a couple of those.

[owl]

Ps fluffy that soba dish looks incredible!

[fluffy]

Thanks!

I ended up signing up for HelloFresh and am giving it a try. So far it's better than Blue Apron but still not worth the cost IMO. But it's nice to be able to get ingredients and recipes without having to think about it or be stressed out in the grocery store.

My big complaint with Blue Apron was that the recipes were way too step-by-step and detailed (and felt like they were generated by an AI); my complaint with HelloFresh so far is that it's actually completely the opposite where every recipe is broken down into 6 macro-steps and it's just like a big flood of words for each step, and it's easy to miss something. Like, oh, where was I supposed to use that ingredient? I chopped it three instructions ago, when does it go into the pot?

Surely there's a better way to present recipes than either of these two extremes.

Another issue with both BA and HF is that they intertwine the steps for a bunch of different parts of the meal, and present things in a sequence which often doesn't make any sense. In the HF case that's down to the macro-steps so things aren't broken down sensibly; in the BA case it was just poor sequencing entirely.

I'm also extremely not a fan of the whole "we provide a 1-ounce tub of vinegar" thing, which both BA and HF do. At least HF expects you to provide your own butter, though, unlike BA which gives you that as well. BA also tends to drive up the "value" of the box by including more exotic ingredients which, yeah, they would in fact cost several dollars to buy, but they don't add anything of value to the recipe compared to a 50-cent equivalent.

HF instead just uses chicken stock concentrate on everything which is its own sort of wearisome but it's a nice shortcut to flavortown anyway.

[fluffy]

Thursday nights I have a drawing group that meets at a coffee shop, and we haven't been meeting for over a month now. Last night one of my drawing friends said he was craving one of the coffee shop's puff-pastry pop tarts, so that put the idea in my brain to make some.

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Pretty simple, just some commercially-available puff pastry, filled with some jam, and given egg wash, a sprinkle of sugar, and baked at 375ºF for around 20 minutes. I also tried tempering chocolate for the first time in my life and it turns out it's really hard. I should have taken Claire Saffitz's advice and used my sous vide circulator to control the temperature. because fuck a bain-marie entirely.

(Needless to say that chocolate isn't setting properly. Still tastes good though.)

[MicahSommer]

So much stress cooking/baking going on right now chez owl. The week’s meals (no pics sorry!) have included:

Dutch baby pancake with fresh lemon curd

We saw multiple friends posting online about making Dutch babies, and owl's post was the last straw.

We had ours with yogurt, apple pie filling and strawberries.

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[owl]

Yum!
Today’s breakfast: bacon; home fries with Italian herbs, garlic, and lemon; and a veggie scramble with onion, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and yellow bell pepper.

I tried to make that viral whipped coffee recipe with cold brew concentrate and failed miserably. I’ll pick up some instant coffee next time we go to the store and try again.

Last night I made a shepherd’s pie (well, no lamb, it had beef and Morningstar veggie crumbles) and crispy roasted Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. Both came out great.

We have a no-knead pizza dough going and will make pizzas tonight. We only have cheddar and Swiss to top it with, but I’m sure it will be good anyway.

[fluffy]

What was the problem with picking pans up? On every induction stove I've used it only shuts off the coil while the pan is off the surface, when the burner wouldn't be heating it anyway. I guess the beep can be slightly annoying but you get used to it

Oh and it turns out you can turn the warning beep off on mine. (I'm sure you were all in immense suspense regarding this.)

[crumpart]

Tried to make sourdough rolls yesterday. Forgot to add salt to the dough. Whoops. Am now in the process of making sourdough croutons.

[Caravan Ray]

AAE977F5-282D-470A-8C14-BF436FE6D6A5_1_105_c.jpeg
soba noodles with beef, fried bean curd, and bell peppers

Oooh cool. I like that one

[Caravan Ray]

CCFD4DAA-F1D1-434E-9EAD-16653155D91B.jpegRotisserie chicken carcass stock

Do you keep your stock?

I alway freeze mine - I have one going that I have had for about 3 years now. Chinese chefs will pass their stock down over generations. I have told my daughter - when I am gone, my stock will be hers.

She didn't seem excited - She told me that she tells her friends that her dad works at the dump and wears a trucker's hat.

[fluffy]

Last night I made sesame beef tacos (via HelloFresh) and my favorite spring/summer salad (not via HelloFresh):

tacos and corn salad

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For the salad, I rinse and drain a can of black beans, add three finely-minced habaneros, some diced bell pepper, some chopped cilantro, and the kernels of two oven-roasted ears of corn. Salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, and cheese (usually I use queso fresco but I didn't have any on-hand so I used mozzarella instead).

Incidentally I'm gonna cancel HelloFresh. There isn't anything phenomenal about any of the recipes (and they call for WAY too much salt and sugar) and it sure is an expensive way to get basic ingredients.

[Chumpy]

I've been working on my mise en place game. This was from an old Blue Apron recipe for "Creamy Harissa Chicken" I had kicking around. We've experimented with Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and Plated in the past just to see what we liked. Overall Plated is my favorite I think, but we kept all our favorite recipes, and now we just buy the ingredients ourselves.

[fluffy]

Yeah that's the way to do it, really... Hello Fresh does give people access to their recipes although I don't think they're anything to write home about, personally. (Same with Blue Apron.) I think I'll go back to my post-Blue Apron plan of just using Epicurious' meal planner thing or something.

Also I hadn't heard of Plated before but it looks like they've pivoted towards selling meal kits to grocery stores. They aren't available at QFC/Kroger and I'm not gonna go to Safeway just to try them out oops looks like they're also only a California thing. Both Kroger and Amazon have their lines of meal kits which just seem pretty meh to me, but that's certainly an approach to get everything you need all in one shot.

Anyway, tonight I decided to try tempering chocolate again, this time using Kenji Lopez-Alt's sous-vide method. It worked like a charm, the only problem being that I used a way-too-large vacuum bag for the amount of chocolate I was tempering so I didn't manage to get a lot out before it set up. Oops. Anyway, lesson learned, and I was still able to make some truffles.

[crumpart]

I think I need to write a love song about my relationship with pomegranate molasses.

[owl]

What do you use it for, crumpart? I had a bottle of it once but only ever made one dish with it (fesenjan)

[fluffy]

I use it in muhammara. Delish. https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2017/06 ... pread.html